Freedom of Science

Herodotus¹ of Halicarnassus² is called the Father of History. He is the one who used the word historia first. By historia he meant research and inquiry. Herodotus lived in a society structured like ours. In the perpetual strife between science and mythology mythology was winning. Like today the ruling class marketed mythology as science to the population in order to control them.

Herodotus’ achievement was not the invention of the new word historia but practicing science. What Herodotus calls history is science because Historia is scientific research.

Herodotus rejected mythological explanation of events. In Historia, the story of Persian Wars, he attributes past events to natural causes. He portrays human action as the prime determinant of history. Herodotus believes that the wisdom of Themistocles and the courage of free men had won the Persian Wars. Compare this scientific attitude with Homer’s. In Iliad anthropocentric gods continuously interfere and influence the outcome of the Trojan War.

Herodotus based his history on real research. Instead of spinning standard tales he culled from traditional sources he did actual research. He gathered evidence throughout Mediterranean world and presented his research as a plausible narrative. Herodotus is a scientist. He uses evidence and relates what he found. Homer presents his poetry as absolute truth justified by the authority of Gods.

Herodotus always identifies his sources even when he doubts their veracity. Herodotus relates the popular story of a diver who swam 11 miles under water without ascending for air and then he deadpans: “My own opinion is that on this occasion he took a boat.”

Herodotus wrote prose not poetry as was popular then.

When Flip wrote that history is not science he was expressing the view of every practicing physicist. To physicists anything outside legal physics is not worthy of their time and attention. Furthermore, anything that is not worth their time is not science. This is why narrow minded and ahistorical physicists fail to see that they have become the mythmakers that Herodotus rejected in his Historia. Like any mythmakers modern physicists too explain history, in this case history of nature, by mythology and occult and mystical causes they invented themselves based on the hermetic code they call physics.

Just reading Peter Woit’s blog shows how much physics has become mythology. Academic physics is a mixture of religious and occult mythology. 

Here’s to you physicist that Herodotus thus talked:

1. Explain natural events with natural events

Newton’s occult force is not a natural event. Don’t use occult causes just because Newton told you so. What Zeus is to lightning Newton is to force. In order to become scientists, i.e. historians like me, you must end your love affair with the occult and start explaining natural events with natural events. Corollary: stop trying to explain supernatural events. Stop reading the mind of God. Gods have no history therefore Gods are not a scientific subject.

2. Base your research on research

Do not sit on your den and spin scenarios about the origin of the universe based on fictional universes invented by the previous generations of mythmakers like yourself. Base your research on history not on a dead legal code you call physics.

3. Identify your sources

As professionals you even corrupted citing sources. Ninety per cent of all citations in academic physics are either link love or blind citations copied from literature without reading the source. Your disdain for history makes this corruption possible. If you respect history you cannot cite without reading what you cite. I understand that most of your scenarios are so absurd that they cannot be justified even by citing sources. Anyway you always cite sources as authority not as sources proving that you are a follower of Homer not me. My source told me that a diver swam under water for 11 miles without coming up for air. I said he took a boat. You tell me that the universe is 6 billion years old. Who is your source? Your source is 50 years of history. You disdain history. You think you have authority over history. You think you can rewrite history. So you take 50 years of observations and fraudulently extrapolate it to 6 billion years. You corrupt history. Your cosmogonic tale is an orders of magnitude taller tale than my diver with lungs of fish.

4. Write prose not poetry

Mathematics is your poetry. What you call mathematics is not mathematics but mathematicism.  Even your prose is poetry since your words are loaded with symbolic meanings of many dimensions that only other doctors can parse. Your meter is mathematical elegance. Your work is all scholastic form and no scientific content.

Thanks Herodotus! This is great advice. Let’s hope that physicists will some day soon realize that 

History = Science

1. More info about Herodotus [↩]
2. The museum in Halicarnassus, modern Bodrum, is an fascinating place. [↩]

ShareThis